September 18, 2016
By Michael & Marita
cruising world, community and day-to-day life of living aboard. The only thing that we haven’t mastered yet is a plan. Our loose plan to sail the Med and slowly bring Let’s Dance home seems to be getting looser – we can’t even make up our minds on where to winter, which turns out to be quite a big decision. More on that later.
We are loving this life. When at sea travelling at 6 knots you would think it might be monotonous but we haven’t found that at all. Every day there’s something different – lots of dolphins, recently schools of flying fish, an occasional tuna catch, a new body board which was floating in the middle of nowhere, ongoing boat maintenance and nowadays constant views of coastal cities and landscapes…
After heading south from France and along Northern Spain and Portugal for several weeks, we finally made a turn to port (that’s hang a left for our non-boatie friends) and eastward into the Gibraltar Strait – a milestone for us and an experience not to be missed. Europe to the left of us … Africa to the right and here we 
are… stuck in the middle with you – make that a lot of traffic; ships that is, and big ones. The Strait itself is fine to navigate but coming into Gibraltar you have to be on your game. Massive ships coming and going at break neck speeds and I can assure you they are not going to get out of your way – that’s your job. We were humming along with a great tailwind but there was no way we were going to dodge that throng of traffic under sail,
so down came the mainsail and gennaker and on with the motors. Time to marvel at all the tankers, cruise ships and ferries swamping us. Things are clearly going to be different in the Mediterranean than along the Atlantic coast where the only thing you needed to dodge 
was hundreds of crab pots.
On the fishing front, we managed to bring in another tuna off the coast of Barbate (much easier with a gaff) and also had a good solid fish strike in the Gibraltar Strait but no capture. That’s ok, we have enough to feed us for a while.